North Korea cuts military hotline with South

North Korea said it is cutting a military hotline with South Korea, amid high tension on the peninsula.

BBC reports that the hotline is used to facilitate the travel of South Korean workers to a joint industrial complex in Kaesong.

Pyongyang has been angered by fresh United Nations sanctions following its February 12 nuclear test and United States-South Korea military drills.

In recent weeks its habitually fiery rhetoric has escalated, with multiple warnings issued.

On Tuesday, it said it had ordered artillery and rocket units into “combat posture” to prepare to target U.S bases in Hawaii, Guam and the U.S mainland.

It has also threatened a “pre-emptive” nuclear strike against the U.S in recent days and told the South it has scrapped the Korean War armistice agreement.

U.S Pentagon spokesman George Little, said on Tuesday that North Korea’s threats “followed a pattern designed to raise tensions” and that North Korea would “achieve nothing by these threats.”

North Korea has already cut both a Red Cross hotline and another used to communicate with the UN Command at Panmunjom in the Demilitarised Zone that divides the two Koreas.

The military hotline is used by the two sides to communicate over travel to the Kaesong joint industrial zone, inside North Korea.

“Under the situation where a war may break out any moment, there is no need to keep up North-South military communications,” a senior North Korean military official was quoted by KCNA news agency as telling the South before the line was severed.